Eric Foner taken to task in Pat Buchanan's conservative magazine

[Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at
Elizabethtown College and the author of Encounters: My Life With
Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.]

ERIC FONER, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia
University, is the most professionally successful academic historian
of our time. He has served as president of all three major historical
organizations, published a widely acclaimed book on Reconstruction as
“America’s unfinished revolution,” and appears frequently on national
television. He and a likeminded historian, James McPherson, have been
conspicuously urging President Obama to sustain affirmative action and
consider reparation payments for the descendants of American slaves.
Foner has put before the public what he considers the unfinished
civil-rights agenda in his 2002 textbook Give Me Liberty: An American
History and in other books written for a popular readership, such as
The Story of American Freedom and Forever Free: The Story of
Emancipation and Reconstruction. Rarely has an historian had such
abundant opportunities to shape public consciousness on a critical
social issue.

Foner’s vision of American history comports with the political
correctness favored by the Left today—indeed at times he seems less
interested in Reconstruction than in reconstructing latterday American
society. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, this project has won him
influential admirers among the Republican Party. But even as Foner
invokes the legacy of slavery and other racial iniquities as pretexts
for government-mandated “social justice” and sensitivity today, he has
never had to say he was
sorry that he and his family whitewashed the crimes of Stalin’s USSR.

Foner has earned high praise from George W. Bush’s gray eminence, Karl
Rove. A 2003 New Yorker profile by Nicholas Lemann noted that one of
Rove’s favorite books was Foner’s study of the early Republican Party,
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. According to Lemann, Rove read the
book “less as a dispassionate analysis of the early Republicans’
strengths and weaknesses than as a guidebook on how to broaden the
appeal of the Party.” Foner was delighted to learn of this: “Karl Rove
is my man,” he told his class at Columbia, even as he continued to
hold Rove’s employer in disregard. In 2006, Foner published a
Washington Post op-ed saying of President Bush, “He’s the Worst
Ever.” “I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst
president in U.S. history,” Foner wrote, comparing him unfavorably
even to the alleged “fervent white supremacist” Andrew Johnson.

Despite the professor’s Bush-bashing, Rove clearly respects Foner, and
so it is perhaps not remarkable that certain phrases from Foner’s
ideas about “the unfinished revolution” popped up in Republican
campaign literature during the 2006 midterm elections. Party
strategists evidently decided that linking the Union side in the Civil
War with the later
civil-rights agenda would provide a useful metaphor for the war to
build democracy in Iraq. The plan only partly succeeded. Although
Rove’s party
picked up votes from the descendants of those who bled and died on the
Confederate side, it did far less well among black voters.